


The Law of 45

by casey270



Category: Adam Lambert (Musician), Tommy Ratliff (Musician)
Genre: American Politics, Brainwashing, Cyber combat, Dystopia, Gen, Political AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-17
Updated: 2017-02-17
Packaged: 2018-09-25 01:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9795557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/casey270/pseuds/casey270
Summary: What could possibly happen, right?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SnowStormSkies](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnowStormSkies/gifts).



> This is something I felt the need to write due to the political climate. It's mostly made up.
> 
>  
> 
> This may or may not become part of something bigger. As it stands, there's only a slight reference to Adam. It's Tommy's life and his POV. If that's not your thing, it's best to back out now.

On the twenty-eighth of May, Tommy reported for work, just as he always had. The job wasn’t much, just thirty hours a week on the phone, answering questions or complaints about how the country was being run, but he knew he was lucky to have it because it was better than nothing. 

And nothing was exactly what most of the people calling in had.

It’d all started going to shit with the election of the new president. It shouldn’t have been a big fucking deal. The country was based on a system of checks and balances, right? No one person, president or not, should have enough power to bring everything down. But that particular _should-have_ quit having any fucking meaning at all about two weeks after the new president took office. Executive orders for travel bans that were never to be called Muslim bans were signed in relative secret, and the country exploded when word got out. It hadn’t settled down since. 

The banking deregulations came next. The rewards of riskier lending and higher interest rates were too much for the banks to pass up. It wasn’t just domestic banks, either. All the world’s big hitters came out to the sandlot to play. The president apparently saw that as a golden opportunity to bring China under his control, since the biggest of the big were all from China, and they were willing to pay with fees and favors for a chance at the exorbitant rates they could charge. What it actually did, though, was throw almost all the new loans into default as soon as the astronomical payments started coming due. Tommy had watched it happen as the banks started lending each other money to keep the industry afloat, never thinking it would actually touch his life. 

Yeah, right.

With no money left to even save themselves, the banks had quit pretending that this wasn’t a world-wide disaster. Then the small businesses that relied on credit to even out cash-flow unpredictability started going under. Once that started, the mid-size companies weren’t far behind. Even the damn monster corporations that everyone had thought were untouchable started to crumble. It was like a fucking domino setup, and Tommy finally saw it coming for him when his job as a software designer disappeared along with the company he’d worked for. 

His paycheck had disappeared first. Except the company had kept issuing them; the bank just refused to cash them. Then his company leased car had been repossessed. Damn, but he’d loved that car, with the sexy-sleek lines and all the bells and whistles. He’d been three days away from having to give up his apartment, but luckily he’d held on.

That was about the same time Tommy found his less than dream job in the call center officially known as the Government Communication Response Center. The President had heralded its inception as his contribution to creating jobs for citizens, but the truth was there were simply too damn many calls coming in to handle them all in one place. Phone servers kept going down because so many citizens needed to scream at someone, vent about the unfairness of it all, or sometimes cry. Satellite offices were opened all across the country, just to field the calls. His job was to soothe what he could, brush off what couldn’t be soothed, or transfer the ones that really sounded like trouble. 

Just this morning, not even six full months after taking this job and less than a year and a half after the inauguration, he’d had one of the calls he probably should have transferred, but something about the voice on the other end of the line had made him stop and think. It was a call from a man who was at the end of his rope, who’d lost everything. 

With no job, no income and an eviction notice sitting in front of him, this man had called and asked Tommy about the legalities of the New Resistance group he’d heard about. Desperate sounding questions came through the line to Tommy, like how much trouble would he get in if he just went to one of the meetings, and how could a peaceful gathering of legal citizens be against the law in the first place?

Tommy had all the approved answers right there on his screen, and he’d felt like the world’s biggest dick as he’d read them off. But he’d done it anyway, because a job was a job, right? He couldn’t afford to lose any more of what he had. 

He’d started in with the approved response, the canned speech the program instructed him to use based on certain keywords that had come up, but even to his own ears, or maybe especially to his own ears, he sounded like nothing more than a automation, a tool used to brainwash the public by repeating the same lies over and over again until everyone was desensitized to their outrageousness and started believing them.

He’d told the caller that ‘any group that was critical of the current administration was considered potentially dangerous, and therefore, by the definition set forth in a new executive order, a terrorist cell. Participating in or with a terrorist cell was punishable by imprisonment or, in extreme cases, by death.’ In short, even though the caller might see glimmers of brotherhood and hope in the rhetoric of the resistance, participation would ultimately bring only more suffering. Such was the party line, the edict of the new regime, and probably the the next breach of the fucking constitution to be passed into a goddamn law. 

That moment was when something inside of him broke. Some glass shell of self preservation that he’d been using to deny what he’d become shattered into nothing more than dust. He could finally see what the hell he’d let himself perpetuate, and he wasn’t too damn happy with what he saw. He discovered that somewhere along the path of doing whatever it took to keep his job, he’d become one of them - those anonymous people who represented the new regime. He’d fallen into a fucking lockstep right along with them. 

Before he had a chance to think about what he was doing, Tommy copied down the personal information of the caller. There was no anonymity anymore. Personal information was always tracked, files were started and lists were made. He used a fake manager's profile he'd made one afternoon as an experiment and an escape from boredom, overwriting the file with so much irrelevant data, corrupting the specific call log so that it would be next to impossible to ever sort it out or to know who did it. He’d always been good at hacking, too. He was no stranger to cyber wars, having spent a good part of his life playing at computer generated spy games and clan clashing. He knew how to cover up what he’d done and make it look like a mechanical malfunction. He still needed this job, after all. Maybe just not for the same reasons anymore. 

Tommy tucked the scrap of paper with the name - Adam, he noted - and phone number in the deepest point of the pocket of his pants. He wanted to make sure it was safe until he got home. He was planning on calling this person back later tonight when he could use the secure line he’d kept, probably doing some investigating on his own. 

There were things he had to know, questions he had to find answers to. Like how the hell had he changed so damn much without noticing? How had he lost touch with the shit-stirring, fishbowl-tapping punk kid who’d been so idealistic and sure of both himself and the ultimate fairness of the world? How had he been so wrapped up in his little corner of life and personal comfort that he’d lost track of the big picture? And most importantly, what the fuck was he supposed to do about it now? 

He was planning on starting his search for those answers tonight, before they slipped even farther away. He wasn’t going to give up until he found out what happened to the real Tommy, the Tommy he used to be. Maybe this Adam could help him, maybe not. Whatever happened and wherever the hunt took him, Tommy was damn well not going to give up without a fight.


End file.
